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In partnership with CCaaS TRANSFORM YOUR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
UC&C | In partnership withIn partnership with
CCaaSTRANSFORM YOUR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Maximise your Customer Experience Investment with a Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS).
The businesses we work with come in all sizes and represent many different industries. They can be national, regional or global and yet, nearly all of them have something in common: they want to solve the same problem, “How do we personalise service everywhere, every time?” While it’s true that brands are getting better at tailoring specific engagements for individuals, most are still challenged to connect the full journeys of customers and employees.
Leading companies are already realising the breakthrough results and new opportunities which can be achieved through CCaaS, and with market growth set to soar, businesses ahead of the curve will have what they need now to innovate and differentiate themselves at every customer touchpoint. Thanks to the cloud, any organisation can exploit CX solutions that had previously only been available to enterprise-level organisations. The flexibility and diversity of CCaaS, offering access to everything from SMS and chat, video, self-service, artificial intelligence, to collaboration tools, is impossible to ignore. CCaaS leaves the static, complex and expensive on-premise contact centre firmly in the past! The future success of organisations at the frontline of customer interactions will be defined by delivering dynamic, highly personalised, seamless customer journeys that today’s customers have come to expect. Whether you want to connect to your customers or improve teamwork, the Genesys PureCloud platform offers the power and flexibility to make it happen. If you’re undecided on CCaaS, or at the beginning of your journey this is your ‘go to’ guide for all things CCaaS related.
Steve LeesonVP Sales, UK & Ireland for Genesys
www.genesys.com
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CCaaS: Transform your Customer Experience
WHAT IS CCaaS? Contact Centre Agility in on On-demand World.
The contact centre is at the heart of the customer experience toolkit.
For a while now, companies have been coming to terms with the fact that it’s no longer price or functionality that will set them apart in the modern marketplace. Success in current landscape means providing meaningful moments with your audience, wherever they might be.
Unfortunately, customers are known for their fickle habits, unpredictable behaviour, and ever-changing demands. There’s nothing more complicated for a business leader, than a consumer. Fortunately, the contact centre is there to bridge the gap between a company, and its audience.
Get your CC solution right, and the
rest of your CX strategy will simply
fall into place.
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CCaaS: Transform your Customer Experience
THE RISE OF CCaaS: FLEXIBLE CONTACT CENTRES FOR A DYNAMIC AUDIENCE So, how can businesses create a contact centre that’s suitable for the ever-changing consumer world?
As customer demands have evolved, the modern business has been forced to develop with them. Multi-generational customers that seek out connections through countless platforms and devices can’t be served by a static, immovable contact centre. They need something fluid, adaptable, and ever-evolving - just like them.
Contact Centre as a Service, or “CCaaS” solutions ensure that companies can create conversations with their clients that span channels and strategies alike. With CCaaS, organisations can deliver everything from SMS and chat, to video, self-service, and more to their customers. What’s more, the extensible nature of the cloud means that your contact centre can also link into your collaboration tools, CRM systems, analytics, and beyond.
In a world where flexibility and scalability are essential, CCaaS gives companies the freedom to move and expand according to the needs of their customers.
The CCaaS market, set to be worth over 20 billion USD by 2020, an excellent option for many business leaders, as it ensures that you’ll never have to be restricted to a one-size-fits-all model as your operational needs evolve.
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CCaaS: Transform your Customer Experience
CCaaS leaves the expense and complexity of the on-premise contact centre behind, in favour of:
FlexibilityCCaaS can adapt to consistent changes in technology, demand, and business operations. What’s more, with pay-as-you-go pricing, businesses can pay for only the resources they need, keeping expenses low.
ScalabilityCCaaS ensures that businesses can scale up and down as needed. In the contact centre, you can add or remove agents to suit seasonal demands and specific campaigns. An on-premise model would require significant capital to add resources in such an on-demand way.
Cloud economicsCCaaS moves the economic burden for a business from Capex to Opex, allowing for better development planning and growth. Cloud services prove to be an economically smart choice for countless companies.
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CCaaS: Transform your Customer Experience
EMBRACING CLOUD CONTACT CENTRES: MARKET SIZE AND GROWTH
The Cloud Contact Centre market is hotter today than it's ever been.
CCaaS players have seen growth of up to 40-50% annually, while on-premise deployments are gradually replaced with more dynamic and scalable solutions.
It’s not just traditional contact centres that are embracing the cloud model either, but CPaaS providers (Communications Platform as a Service) and CRM software companies (Customer Relationship Management) too.
By 2023, predictions place the CCaaS market at a value of $30.98 billion.
One of the driving factors behind CCaaS growth is the fact that it allows companies to resolve issues and respond to customer expectations as they evolve. Now that today’s customers expect everything from SMS, voice, and email interactions at an instant, they have no tolerance for disruptions or delays. As new interaction channels continue to emerge, updating on-premise solutions with their custom integrations and complex hardware is unaffordable and impractical.
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CCaaS: Transform your Customer Experience
By the time you have updated your on-premise solutions to suit the modern environment, new trends will have already appeared. CCaaS providers help to solve this problem by making evolution instantaneous. All the while, APIs allow companies to bring greater functionality into their cloud experience whenever and however they choose.
Businesses can now combine their contact centres on the cloud with CRM systems, service management and provisioning tools, back-end collaboration, artificial intelligence, analytics, and more. All this flexibility means that businesses can launch and enhance their cloud contact centres in much less time than before.
Even larger companies are beginning to gradually leave their legacy investments behind in search of new ways of leveraging the cloud - including embracing hybrid strategies of on-prem and on-cloud equipment.
The business environment is more virtual than ever, giving businesses access to everything from high-reliability and security, to 24/7 technical support.
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CCaaS: Transform your Customer Experience
CONTACT CENTRE TRENDS IN 2019 Currently, technology is advancing at a rapid pace across virtually every industry.
However, there are few places where the rise of new and disruptive technology has been more apparent than in the contact centre. Today, companies are transforming the way that customer service is delivered. We’ve seen the rise of everything from artificial intelligence and machine learning, to IoT-infused predictive analytics.
Some of the most significant trends we’ve seen this year include:
Increased demand for digital transformationDigital Transformation has become more than just a buzzword or concept. Today, it’s an essential component of remaining competitive in a changing environment. Traditional call centres have begun to give way to multi-channel environments for communication. These channels are being integrated with workforce management, CRM solutions, and even analytics to deliver a more seamless level of customer service.
Cloud-based systems capable of combining everything from communication and collaboration tools to analytics and AI is the clear way to move into the future. This approach paves the way towards a more immersive and effective contact centre, which meets the rising demands for customer and business experience.
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CCaaS: Transform your Customer Experience
Growing Appetite for AIAI is another concept that started as a buzzword and gradually made its way into the mainstream. Most businesses aren’t worrying anymore about whether their robots will replace human agents. Instead, they’re looking at intelligence and virtual assistants to support the contact centre team and supplement agent capacity and capability.
AI can automate routine tasks, freeing agents up to tackle the more complex interactions common in the contact centre. When combined with machine learning, AI can guide crucial decisions in customer contact, provide prompts based on customer behaviour, and more. This gives businesses a new opportunity to optimize the customer journey. According to Aberdeen studies, companies using AI achieve 2.5 times greater CSAT rates, and 2.4 times higher year-over-year revenue increases too.
Enhanced focus on Customer Service CX is one of the most critical trends today. The world is adapting to suit the needs of an ever-changing consumer base, with omnichannel conversations, faster intelligent routing, and even predictive analytics. The emergence of IoT (the Internet of Things) allows businesses to proactively serve customers, reaching out to them based on information gathered from a connected device.
What’s more, contact centres are also embracing new ways to measure the performance of their CX initiatives. The customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is emerging as the ultimate indicator of the quality of customer experiences. This number can be evaluated at both agent and team levels to determine meaningful insights on customer satisfaction.
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CCaaS: Transform your Customer Experience
CCaaS FUNDAMENTALS: WHAT TO EXPECT FROM CCaaS Contact Centre as a Service system is a cloud-based hub of technology, intended to give businesses the solutions they need to support customers in any environment.
The CCaaS model ensures that your initial investments are low and that your ongoing expenses are limited, thanks to a pay-as-you-go model. On the surface, CCaaS solutions are very similar in features to the standard contact centre.
Just like in an on-premise environment, you can expect to find IVR and call routing services, call recording and management systems, ACD technology, and solutions for fraud protection and security. However, the cloud-based nature of CCaaS also means that companies can tap into even more immersive features too.
For instance, you can:
Unlock omnichannel communications: Omnichannel communications have emerged as a hot-button topic in recent years. Customers now have endless ways to connect with their favourite companies, from SMS to social media chat and video. Leading businesses know that if they want to serve their customer base, they need to provide a consistent experience across every channel.
Omnichannel contact centres delivered over CCaaS connect every consumer touchpoint into a seamless journey, with contextual information and analytics available to agents at every stage. This means that customers don’t have to repeat themselves to multiple agents, and they can reach out to brands on the mediums that suit them.
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CCaaS: Transform your Customer Experience
Modern IVR and self-service solutions: CCaaS not only extends the environments where customer conversations can take place, but it also speeds up time to resolution in other ways. For instance, advanced IVR solutions can use artificial intelligence to cleverly route customers to the agent best-suited to solve their problems. At the same time, chat-bots and virtual assistants provide an updated way for customers to take a DIY approach to service.
Self-serve solutions provide emotional benefits to customers and take some of the weight off agent shoulders by ensuring they spend time dealing with only the problems that can’t be solved by robots and automated processes.
More impressive and cost-effective agents: CCaaS gives employers the freedom to access talent from all over the world. Employees can log into their tools via the cloud, opening the door for remote working, which reduces business overheads and transforms customer experience. Employers also have the freedom to hire agents that are local to the specific customers they want to reach, providing a more intimate experiences for consumers.
All the while, access to the cloud and a flexible pay-as-you-go model means that even global expansion remains affordable.
Extend functionality with APIs: Today’s contact centres play an important role in the new age of “unified communications”. As consumer demands continue to evolve, the CC space ensures that businesses can align their strategies for customer experience with things like CRM contextual insights, analytical information, AI algorithms, and so much more.
The rise of APIs ensures that you can combine your contact centre with anything, from back-end collaboration tools that allow employees to work together to solve consumer problems, to chatbots and predictive analytics.
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CCaaS: Transform your Customer Experience
BUILDING A CCaaS STRATEGY: MOVING INTO THE CLOUD Embracing the ever-evolving trends of the contact centre requires companies to consider the flexibility and scalability of the cloud carefully.
However, moving into the cloud doesn’t have to happen in one go. Vendors offering hybrid cloud options are allowing even larger companies with in-depth investments to create tailored strategies for migration.
Like any transformative business initiative, embracing CCaaS requires careful consideration and strategy. It’s all about finding the path that works best for you.
STEP
1Finding a Vendor that aligns with your goalsPerhaps the most crucial stage in any successful CCaaS strategy is finding the right vendor to work with. You’ll need to ensure that the vendor you choose is aligned with the strategies and goals of your organisation. After all, moving to the cloud is a big step for many businesses.
Ask yourself:
How will this vendor help me to upgrade and manage my global contact centres?
What can they do to support multiple locations and align my analytics?
Can they provide a customised entry into the cloud?
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CCaaS: Transform your Customer Experience
The best vendors are those that allow you to phase your contact centre into the CCaaS environment at a speed that suits you. Many of today’s CCaaS vendors an also help you to create tailored architectures that leverages and deploys best-of-breed deployment models to satisfy your company’s growth and business initiatives.
Ensuring Flexibility Additionally, companies need to understand how they’re going to continue to use existing systems alongside new innovations when they embrace CCaaS. Solution providers in the cloud need to be able to provide the right level of customisation for their clients. There’s no one-size-fits-all path to the cloud.
Make sure that your vendor can work with you to deliver the integrations that you need to keep your contact centres running smoothly. This could mean looking for ways to bring legacy equipment and cloud-based environments together in a seamless solution that spans across multiple countries. Find out whether your provider has a broad partner network available that improves extensibility. What kind of APIs do they have for third-party developers, and how open is the platform overall? Can you change and update your capabilities as required as your business grows?
Managing your Migration Moving into the cloud can be a big step for larger companies. If you have multiple contact centres across the globe, you’ll need to think about how you will be able to support distributed teams across various geographies. How are you going to ensure that you can continue to provide your customers with a reliable and local experience in every part of the world that you serve? Is it possible to create a global and universal contact centre queue that allows you to manage virtual teams around the world?
This would allow you to provide your customers with a level of service that “follow-the-sun” so that you can always be available to solve their problems. Cloud-based solutions through CCaaS are often very effective at helping companies to establish new locations and agent groups without excessive cost.
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CCaaS: Transform your Customer Experience
However, you’ll need to make sure that your vendor offers a geographically distributed solution for high availability and business continuity.
Ensuring SecurityAny contact centre, whether on-premise or in the cloud needs to be secure, particularly in an age where privacy and safety are more important than ever. For a successful migration, companies will need to think carefully about the security and compliance features that their vendor offers. Think about how you’re going to meet with regulations like PCI and GDPR in different locations around the world. Your CCaaS provider needs to be able to reassure you that you’re using fully compliant services in every part of the world.
Before you invest in any cloud solution, do your research into regulations like ISO 27001 standards, Service Organisation Control (SOC), and PCI. It’s also worth finding out how secure your data centres will be, and what kind of solutions your provider has in place for seamless failover and disaster recovery in data centres around the world.
Supporting your TeamsFinally, make sure that whatever solution you embrace, it’s simple and accessible for your teams. Even the best CCaaS solution can’t provide the results that your company needs if your employees don’t know how to make the most of it. A simple user interface that allows agents to combine all of their communications into a single pane of glass is an excellent way forward. The more unified the contact centre experience is, the less time your employees have to waste jumping between services.
A truly unified CCaaS solution will also need to connect with other parts of your communication technology, including the back-end UCaaS offering for communication and collaboration. If your employees can seamlessly combine their collaborative back-end techniques with front-end customer service, your productivity and efficiency are sure to evolve.
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CCaaS: Transform your Customer Experience
EMBRACING THE RIGHT CONTACT CENTRE TOOLS As customers and companies alike continue to prize greater mobility in their technology, leveraging the cloud has become the easiest path for organisations to keep ahead of changing requirements.
However, building the perfect ecosystem isn’t always simple.
There’s a lot of different hardware and software available on the market today to support everyone from the average agent, to the supervisor and CX leader. Some of the most essential tools required for the new age of the ever-evolving customer include:
Call Recording and Speech AnalyticsCall recording has been a common feature of the contact centre for some time. Companies rely on their recording for compliance purposes, in-depth insights and more. Today, one of the most important features of a call recording system, is the ability to monitor conversation quality in the contact centre. There’s a wealth of data hidden in audio interactions, not just about your customer’s sentiment towards your business, but their responses to certain strategies used by your agents.
To make the most of call recordings, businesses need to explore the possibilities of speech analytics, which allows them to individually analyse and score 100% of recordings. These analytics can lead to automated performance feedback for agent and supervisors, as well as insights into customer trends and behaviour. Through call recording, businesses can access the true value of voice interactions.
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CCaaS: Transform your Customer Experience
Contact centre analysis, scoring, and evaluationAnalytical tools give businesses an excellent opportunity to determine just how effective their call centres are at driving sales and customer loyalty. The days of relying on supervisor skill to get the most of your agent are over. Today’s businesses can finally take advantage of sophisticated analytics that turn data like screen and call recordings into immersive feedback.
There’s too much information in today’s omnichannel environment to manually observe and monitor each conversation. However, analytical programs allow businesses to build dashboards that present the data that really affect agents. These statistical dashboards can display on user interfaces, so managers and agents have real-time updates into customer satisfaction and performance.
Dashboards can include:
Speech and sentiment analytics
Trends in customer conversations based on keyword and phrases
Automated coaching and AI-driven suggestions
Gamification with points allocated to high-performing team members
Alerts for supervisors when team members need additional help
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CCaaS: Transform your Customer Experience
WFO and WFM Tools with AI integrations To truly take advantage of the modern contact centre, many businesses are beginning to rely heavily on workforce optimisation, and workforce management tools built into their CCaaS systems. These technologies feature a range of modules that help supervisors and managers to drive business productivity.
For instance, many WFO and WFM tools include:
Access to dashboards where you can forecast call volume and interactions, schedule agents, manage critical KPIs, and more.
Call recording and screen recording that allows for analysis at a later date.
Quality management that provide insights into agent compliance to company guidelines and procedures.
It’s even possible to implement artificial intelligence into WFO and WFM tools so that businesses can get more intelligent feedback from agent performance. Artificial intelligence can also offer support to team members by giving them virtual assistant-style support. An AI chatbot can pull up contextual data from an integrated CRM for agents in an instant or offer advice on how to turn a conversation around after an analysis of customer sentiment.
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CCaaS: Transform your Customer Experience
COLLABORATION IN THE CONTACT CENTRE: END-TO-END CONNECTIONS Teams work better when they’re connected. However, there are still countless contact centres throughout the world that still rely on email and other slow solutions for communication. The rise of CCaaS provides an entry point to contact centre 2.0. In this new environment, a shift into the cloud gives distributed, and in-house agents access to consistent, collaborative, intelligent, and omnichannel technology.
Modernizing the contact centre doesn’t just mean providing the latest solutions for customer contact, it also means bringing agents together in a more cohesive back-end environment too. With a collaborative environment, companies can effectively improve agent engagement and productivity, making it easier to share information between multiple groups, and enhance the customer experience.
Collaboration in the contact centre leads to:
Faster, Improved service from Agents: In an environment that experiences frequent turnover, like the contact centre, it’s important for companies to make sure that they’re constantly offering a consistent experience to their end-users. This means building a strategy where your business can leverage trained, knowledgeable, and engaged agents every day.
A collaborative environment ensures that agents can always have access to support and resources when they need them most. Through CCaaS settings, cloud-connected agents can access useful files and resources during customer conversations so that they can customise their efforts to suit each client’s needs. New hires can even reach out for help from more experienced people when they’re getting used to the new contact centre environment.
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CCaaS: Transform your Customer Experience
Insights from Experts Beyond the Contact Centre: Even with intelligent routing to ensure that each customer is routed to the most suitable agent, there’s always a chance that your employees will need extra help serving a customer. Complicated issues might require agents to reach out to people beyond the contact centre, and cloud-based collaboration tools can facilitate that.
Through a collaboration tool, your agent can reach out to experts anywhere, seeking feedback from contractors, specialists, and more via everything from instant chat to video. They can even share their screen in real-time to provide more context for supporting team members to help solve a problem
Deeper customer relationships: The more first-time resolutions a company can provide to customers, the better that organisation’s reputation becomes. While it won’t always be possible to rectify problems immediately, collaboration tools ensure that team members can work together to provide a solution as quickly and seamlessly as possible. With the right collaboration software built into your CCaaS solution, agents can share documents, connect with subject-matter experts, and more to get the help they need.
When your contact centre connects a seamless back-end environment with an innovative front-end for customer communication, you create a more effective environment for customer service. Rather than having individual agents solving specific customer problems, you get a space where your teams can work cohesively together to deliver real results.
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CCaaS: Transform your Customer Experience
AI IN THE CONTACT CENTRE Better connection between human agents leads to better resolutions for customers.
However, in today’s modern world, there’s more than just the human agent to consider when it comes to achieving ultimate productivity. Gradually, we’re beginning to see the benefits that come from combining people, processes, and things, in the age of IoT and AI.
Although artificial intelligence has made an impact on various parts of the world today, it has a particularly strong role to play in the growth of the contact centre. After all, these algorithms perform best when they have access to a lot of data. The CC space is a hub of customer data, brimming with everything from screen and textual insights, to information taken from the human voice.
The modern contact centre is no longer a hive of buzzing employees and ringing desk phones. Instead, we’re seeing a revolution in the agent and business experience, driven by the rise of automated assistants, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
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CCaaS: Transform your Customer Experience
BRINGING AI INTO THE CONTACT CENTRE For years, the contact centre has been on the cutting edge of automation technology.
IVRs have transformed the way that people interact with businesses, and call routing has ensured that we can get customers to the right agent as quickly as possible.
However, as consumer demands continue to evolve, AI could be the easiest way to give today’s customers the enhanced service that they’re looking for.
Just some of the ways that AI is making its way into the contact centre include:
Replacing IVR processes: Most IVR systems follow a set of simplistic rules to determine how calls should be routed. Often, these tools aren’t advanced enough to understand the context of a customer request or problem. On the other hand, AI, which includes access to things like machine learning and natural language processing, can understand the nature of statements. AI can provide customers with more intelligent access to the right agent or even offer solutions for self-service when the time is right.
Capturing customer data: AI, chatbots, and other machine learning tools can attract vast amounts of granular data around each customer interaction, which can be fed into an analytics engine to improve the call centre environment. Sentiment analysis allows businesses to spot trends in customer experiences and eliminate periods of dissatisfaction and anger. What’s more, AI analytics will enable businesses to build even better IVR and virtual agent solutions in the future based on richer customer data.
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CCaaS: Transform your Customer Experience
Augmented agents: With AI, it’s possible for businesses to give contact centre agents constant support and guidance when dealing with demanding clients. They won’t need to wait for a supervisor to be available to assist. Instead, AI tools can assess the sentiment and behaviour of a customer and provide suggestions based on previous interactions. AI can also augment the agent performance by providing real-time access to contextual information about earlier discussions with the client or prior purchases.
Improved self-service: With today’s contact centre agents now under more pressure than ever before, the AI environment can also remove some of the strain through self-service offerings. AI will be able to answer repetitive questions and solve customer problems before a customer is sent to a human agent - meaning that employees have more time to focus on the right challenges.
Predicting customer needs: RPA (Robotic Process Automation) tools in the contact centre can leverage machine learning engines and big data to anticipate the needs of customers so that chatbots can communicate with clients proactively. This will make it easier for businesses to up-sell or cross-sell offerings to new and existing clients.
Vendors in the contact centre environment are even beginning to experiment with new technology that could enhance the way that agents and customers communicate even further. With the rise of 5G coupled with artificial intelligence, it may one day be possible to create immersive and contextual AR and VR environments where agents can interact with clients. For example, a Holiday company could provide you with a virtual tour of the resort from your living room before you commit your purchase.
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CCaaS: Transform your Customer Experience
CONTACT CENTRES 2020: THE FUTURE OF CX TECHNOLOGYContact centres have always been at the heart of the customer experience.
However, the way that companies work is evolving.
Experts have predicted that by 2020, 85% of all customer service interactions will be handled without a human agent.
Additionally, now that consumers demand a more diverse “omnichannel” approach to communication, companies need to think more carefully about how they can anticipate changes in customer expectations and invest in their future accordingly.
According to studies from Genesys into the mid-sized contact centre:
of European contact centres see a higher momentum in cloud and everything-as-a-service approaches to CX.
60% 77% of respondents believe that big data analytics is becoming more crucial to their organisation.
of respondents expect that AI will need to play a significant role in engagement and customer support channels.
64% 55% of European companies expect to support messaging apps and virtual assistants in their CX initiatives in the years to come.
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CCaaS: Transform your Customer Experience
As customer experience continues to be the only real way for today’s businesses to differentiate themselves from the competition, companies can no longer afford to ignore the potential of the cloud. The flexibility and diversity of CCaaS, offering access to everything from artificial intelligence, to collaboration tools, and endless extensibility, is critical.
Going forward, CCaaS will continue to be the go-to solution for businesses that need to align big data, AI, and endless evolving tools in a quest to provide the kind of experiences that their customers are looking for. Cloud-based and omnichannel contact centres are the best way to deliver the personalised, predictive, and immersive services that clients need.
Embracing the future of CX in the isn’t just about implementing an omnichannel environment or accessing the latest tools. It’s about finding a way to bring everything the modern business needs to serve its customer into the same unified environment. With a proven migration path to the cloud, companies can have the freedom they need to propel customer experience initiatives forward and access new technologies that produce truly transformative results.
However, despite the apparent evolution of the contact centre, many companies are still struggling to embrace the future. Around 46% of respondents in the study above say that they still use multiple platforms to support agents, rather than accessing a single platform to integrate all channels.
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CCaaS: Transform your Customer Experience
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